Mandelbulber 0.60: Multi-core CPU Fractal Generator

Mandelbulber is a renderer for 3D Mandelbrot fractals like Mandelbulb , Mandelbox, Bulbbox, Juliabulb, Menger Sponge. Its author, Krzysztof Marczak produces some of the most stunning fractal images currently on the web as well as spectacular videos using Mandelbulber :

Mandelbulber takes advantage of multi-core CPUs and its 64-bit version allows to produce very large images. A very powerful software which is worth investing some time in its non trivial user interface. But since it’s open source (C++), Mandelbulber may become more user friendly in the future and, who knows, use GPUs for computation one day.

how would an absolute newbie start doing something like this? what program(s) would provide good results with a reasonable learning curve that was not too confusing? would i need to know any of the programing code languages such as C++ ? Please excuse my obvious ignorance in this field…but i have seen some amazing examples of fractal art and would like to attempt a few of my own…